'A summit like no other'

The Amman meeting could pave the road to better Arab relations. Dina Ezzat writes
In Amman on Saturday, Arab foreign ministers will gather to prepare for the two-day Arab summit hosted by Jordan -- the first of the regular annual summits Arab leaders pledged to hold when they met last October in Cairo. During the opening ceremony, President Hosni Mubarak, the chair of the Arab summit for the past five years -- since the last two summits convened in Cairo -- will hand over the summit presidency to Jordan's monarch, King Abdullah.
Arab leaders who are expected to miss the event due to serious health problems are King Fahd of Saudi Arabia and Sheikh Zayed of the United Arab Emirates.
There is much speculation as to whether or not Saddam Hussein, Iraq's president, who has kept his whereabouts a secret for the past decade, will make a brief appearance to address the summit. "This is very unlikely. It is true that Amman and Baghdad have a special relation of sorts, but Saddam Hussein would be too worried for his life to leave Iraq," commented an Arab League source. He added that if Hussein does decide to show up in Amman on the 27th, he will force the summit to shift its focus from the Palestinian cause, the scheduled topic of discussions, to the Iraqi issue, which is the thorniest of all the Arab questions.
The summit opens against a backdrop of serious official and popular frustration at the decreasing likelihood of peace with Israel under the government of Likud hard-liner and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. It also comes at a time of increasing Arab and international debate about the need to lift or at least alleviate the sanctions that have stifled Iraq for the past decade.
Arab diplomats speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly argue that the summit's results will not be earth-shattering. Judging from the opinions expressed in the Arab foreign ministers' council at Arab League headquarters 10 days ago, diplomats argue that "things will be set in motion, but not fixed."
So what can be expected from this summit? The spirit of Arab reconciliation should be kindled, particularly on the Iraq-Kuwait front. Foreign Minister Amr Moussa agreed that "obviously, there is still a gap between Iraq and Kuwait," but cautioned that this does not eliminate the possibility of "getting things going."
Arab diplomats say Iraq, despite the occasional provocative statement, is responding positively overall to discussions of the Iraq-Kuwait issue. Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, they argue, are also responding to increasing pressure and may take measures to reducing the suffering of the Iraqi people, irrespective of their policy on the Iraqi regime. "Kuwait is becoming aware of the international trend -- that includes the US -- to replace the current harsh sanctions on Iraq with so-called smart sanctions," commented one diplomatic source.
In other words, the Arab countries will not grant Iraq its wish to remove the sanctions unilaterally; nor will they publicly condemn the no-fly zones imposed by the US with the implicit consent of Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Iraq, however, it is promised, will see the light at the end of the tunnel by the end of this summit.
Essentially financial support will be pledged to the Palestinian Authority on an easier basis than that projected at the most recent Cairo summit. The Palestinian Authority will be receiving $40 million monthly to pay its employees' desperately overdue salaries.
Moreover, the Amman communiqué is expected to send Sharon a clear message that the Arabs will insist on the peace parameters stipulated at the Madrid peace conference, and will make an implicit call to resume peace negotiations where they ended. But the total Arab boycott on Israel that some capitals are hoping for will remain very elusive.
The summit's main achievement, however, according to one Egyptian diplomat, will be to institutionalise an annual Arab summit and monthly meetings of a limited group of Arab foreign ministers to follow up on resolutions. "So this is a summit like no other, in the sense that it is paving the way to restart coordinated Arab relations and consultations with a view to realising broader Arab political and economic interests," the source said. He added: "Given that this summit comes only weeks before Foreign Minister Moussa takes the helm of the Arab League, there is increasing enthusiasm for the cause of better Arab relations and the reform of the Arab League."
So if all goes well during the summit, when they reconvene in the United Arab Emirates in March 2002 it may be possible for Arab leaders to take decisions -- on Iraq and the peace process -- that they are unlikely to reach in Amman.
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